Conference Theme

Hans Hollein in his 1968 manifesto All is Architecture
put forth the demand that architects should at last "stop
thinking only in materials". An echo of this utopian form
of architecture, which no-one, including himself, has ever
attempted, we may find in the present deconstructive architecture.
Its struggle against the forces of gravity, the denial of
the laws of matter, is remnant of that utopia-addicted time.
The actual message of deconstruction would be a mathematization
of space as a partial solution of an architecture of the
media. The Cartesian cube, as a basic module of architecture,
would then still persist as a point of departure, but would
appear as an object that is now capable of being mathematically
transformed and distorted. These transformations would aim
towards a process of 'immaterialising' static architecture,
i.e. transforming it into a dynamic system that would be
context-dependent and could be locally controlled. Architecture
would thus become a medium of perpetual change, both in
time and space, a context-directed event-world." (Peter
Weibel in Intelligente Ambiente, Ars Electronica 1994).

Architecture has turned into an interface-technology.
An interface between inhabitants and their environment.
In 1989, the writer and philosopher, Vilém Flusser, suggested
that in the future we would be building houses which resemble
living organisms, including spinal columns. Until today,
buildings have not been "viable" machines, but in the future
they will quickly become viable because they are becoming
more "intelligent". They will become like the skin of an
organism which they will simulate through an artificial
nervous system. Thus we can see the emergence of the notion
of the building as a living, organic environment. What these
buildings will look like - whether they will be hovering
egg-shells or pulsating microbes, or even, like a central
nervous system, surrounded by an electro-magnetic skin -
is difficult to predict at this moment in time, and may
not even be too relevant. More importantly, architecture
has to realize that it has to move on from the paradigms
of the mechanical to the electronic age, and that this will
also have far-reaching consequences for what we conceive
of as architecture today.

The technological and the
biological, once regarded as opposites, are increasingly
merging into hybrid constellations. This calls up the old
question of the definitions of life and nature, and what
their relation is to technology and culture. We can observe
a shift from a world of constants to a world of variables
in which the biological is placed ever closer to the technological.
This shift takes place simultaneously with the growing technologisation
of society.

The transport revolution of a century ago,
which forms part of the overall mechanisation of society,
determined many facets of the development of modern cities.
In a similar way, the ultimate transport revolution, i.e.
the transportation of digital information via electronic
networks, will leave its mark on the development of the
living and working environments of people in neo-industrial
societies of the next century. The colonisation of electronic
space - if we can speak about space in this context - has
only just begun. We see the creation of new information
spaces which have structures distinctly different from those
of "the landscape" or "the city", but which still refer
to the latter and are influenced by them. For instance,
communities emerge in these electronic spaces not in relation
to geographical conditions, but on the basis of shared interests
or needs. The question of the relations between the different
spaces and how they are connected to each other is crucial
and refers directly to architecture because the latter deals
with the structure and the moulding of space, time, and
function.

The electronic spaces are expanding at an incredible
speed and intersect with the spaces within which we live
and work on a multitude of levels. Spaces with different
characteristics and specific temporal and spatial dynamics
influence each other to an increasing degree. The connections,
links and gateways between them are so far mainly being
developed by technologists. This amplifies the cultural
conflicts which emerge around the visualisation and structuration
of information.

The conference addressed the following
developments:

* Is there a necessity to develop an architecture
which behaves as a dynamic system within which the inhabitants,
environment and architecture interact and whose functions
are continuously constituted and reconstituted by the interaction
between the system (architectural construction) and the
user?

* The electronic spaces are expanding at an incredible
speed and intersect with the spaces within which we live
and work on a multitude of levels. Spaces with different
characteristics and their own temporal and spatial dynamics
influence each other to an increasing degree. The connections,
links and gateways between them are so far mainly being
developed by technologists. This amplifies the cultural
conflicts which emerge around the visualisation and structuration
of information. According to which strategies and values
can architects design the gateways between these spaces?
How will architects respond to the challenge of providing
interfaces between the new environments and their human
users?

* The technological and the biological, once
regarded as opposites, are today increasingly merging into
hybrid constellations. This calls up the old question of
the definitions of life and nature, and what their relation
is to technology and culture. We can observe a shift from
a world of constants to a world of variables in which the
biological is placed ever closer to the technological and
vice versa. This shift takes place simultaneously with the
growing technologisation of society. Architecture should
place itself at the heart of this discussion which deals
with the very basics of architecture. What will the revaluation
and redefinition of the concepts of Life, Nature and Culture
mean for architecture and how does this articulate itself
in contemporary architecture?

When we are talking about
architecture in relation to the electronic media we are
dealing not only with a technical question, but also with
the basic elements that define architecture.

Abstracts and Lectures

Interfacing Realities: Bart Lootsma (Introduction)

When talking about the relation between architecture and
technology we traditionally deal with four different topics:
organisation and infrastructure, aesthetics, construction,
and production. The latter two topics are evident: while
developments in the calculation of constructions have made
wider suspensions possible as well as a reduction in materials,
developments in construction technology have led to an industrialisation
of the construction process. Such developments in production
and construction were to a large degree determining for
what Reyner Banham has called the First Machine Age and
for the successful break-through of modern architecture.
We will probably not talk much about these two topics during
the conference, although it would be interesting to ask
the panellists whether, and if yes, how they think the electronic
revolution is also going to affect the construction and
production of their designs. Machine Age or not, building
is still one of the most archaic human activities. However,
building is not one of the favourite subjects in the contemporary
debate which focuses rather on imagining a completely immaterial
architecture.

The First Machine Age also saw important
changes in the field of infrastructure and organisation.
Gas, water and light entered the buildings, and motorised
traffic had its impact on urban development and planning.
The building itself was conceived as a machine, as a disciplining
or a curing machine like it has been described by Foucault,
or as a machine à habiter as outlined by Le Corbusier,
for which the factory and the abattoir served as models,
as well as the ideas by Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor.
All of them were buildings or machines which wanted to influence
or improve the conditions and the behaviour of their inhabitants
- sometimes quite drastically and against their will. Architecture
tried to bring nature under its control.

What is most
remarkable and surprising in the contemporary discussion
about the influence of technology on architecture is that
the relation between architecture and nature is conceived
in a completely different way. Technology is now being conceived
or imagined as a means of flexibly adapting architecture
to nature. The computer then plays a crucial role as an
intermediary between the organism and the technology. The
organism can, in this case, be an individual body as well
as a group of bodies, and the way in which and the entities
between which the computer "mediates" is construed very
differently by today"s panellists.

The title of this
conference, Interfacing Realities, suggests that the computer
mediates between different realities. Between different
landscapes, varying according to what we traditionally understand
as landscape in architecture and urban planning, supplemented
by landscapes in which wind, rain and sound also play an
active role, and also fully virtual media landscapes. The
computer mediates these landscapes to different configurations
of bodies, configurations whose dynamic development can
again be simulated and investigated by means of the computer.
The mediation itself can also take on changing, dynamic
forms. The dynamics of mediation sometimes makes the technology
itself appear like an organism, or at least take on organic
features. The dynamic role of the computer as mediator for
the design also implies a shift regarding the moment of
creative intervention by the designer. The design appears
to receive a less and less definitive style or form specified
by the designer. This form is increasingly determined by
the choice of software and by the selection of data that
are imported.

Interfacing Realities: Christian Möller

Generations of architects have chiseled away at the 'language of building'. Christian Möller no longer understands this language metaphorically. His installations, which consistently make use of electronic high-tech media as a mainstay of architectonic design, present a very new form of architecture. It is one that rests on the notion of dialogue, for Möller's interactive, virtual architecture reacts and acts, i.e. it quite literally enters into a discourse with its users and viewers. (...) Architecture is actually given a voice, because it is no longer an object of perception (to be interpreted in some manner or other), but rather a system of communication. In the form of interfaces integrated unobtrusively into the installation, it contains, on the one hand, sensitive perceptual organs and, on the other, sensuous acoustic and visual transmitters. Christian Möller was decisively influenced by the fact that the building materials of traditional architecture respond, if hardly noticeable, to users: floorboards squeak, tiles rattle in the wind, and window frames creak. This increasingly sought-after sensuous interactivity was what prompted Möller to devise a more clearly profiled active form of architecture.

The installations involving virtual space initially start from assumptions related to our senses: everyday sensations and phenomena, such as noises, states of balance, humidity, wind, ambient temperature or light, regulate the architectonic structures (according to predefined algorithms) - creating feelings or expressions of the edifice's human or climatic surroundings. Möller's 'interactive architecture' also gives them a much more pronounced sensuous form: things otherwise only visible become audible, the acoustic is lent visual form, and the tangible becomes visible in colour. (...)

Spatial definition, i.e. the definition of outside and inside, usually depends on the viewer's vantage point. If the latter is set in motion, then so, too, is the definition of space. In Möller's installations involving virtual space the interfaces are the viewer's architectonic playground. The room the viewer has for movement on the interfaces corresponds carefully to the spatial irritations s/he thus sets in motion. (...) In installations which focus on the interactive presentation of reproduced images, specific interfaces provide decisive room for manoeuver for the viewer and alter his/her way of looking. (Susanne Craemer)

Interfacing Realities: Greg Lynn

Historically, architects have understood movement as the
travel of a moving eye in space. Yet, architecture, in both
its realization and its conception, has been understood
as static, fixed, ideal and inert. Themes of motion and
dynamics in architecture are typically addressed through
pictorial views of static forms. Not only have buildings
been constructed as static forms, but more importantly architecture
has been conceived and designed based on models of stasis
and equilibrium. Typically, computer animation software
reinforces this normative assumption that architectural
design belongs in static Cartesian space waiting to be animated
by a mobile view.

In his upcoming exhibition in Artists
Space in New york city, Greg Lynn will present some projects
that develop through the development of provisional prototypes
that are chosen for their flexibility and adaptability.
To initiate transformation and mutation, external constraints
are exerted on these internally regulated prototypes. The
result of this interaction between a generalized flexible
organization and particular external constraints is a design
process that has an undecidable outcome. This process of
increasing novelty through the incorporation of external
constraints mandates an improvisational design attitude.
This shift from determinism to directed indeterminacy is
central to the development of a dynamic design method. The
use of topological geometries that are capable of being
bent, twisted, deformed and differentiated while maintaining
their continuity is also necessary.

In their search
for systems that can simulate the appearance of life, the
special effects and animation industry has developed a useful
set of tools for these investigations; as contemporary animation
software utilizes a combination of deformable surfaces and
physical forces. The convergence of computer aided technological
processes and biological models of growth, development and
transformation can be investigated using animation rather
than conventional architectural design software. Rather
than being designed as stationary inert forms, space is
highly plastic, flexible, and mutable in its dynamic evolution
through motion and transformation. In animation simulations,
form is not only defined by its internal parameters, as
it is also effected by a mosaic of other fluctuating external,
invisible forces and gradients including: gravity, wind,
turbulence, magnetism and swarms of moving particles. These
gradient field effects are used as abstract analogies for:
pedestrian and automotive movement, environmental forces
such as wind and sun, urban views and alignments, and intensities
of use and occupation in time.

Interfacing Realities: NOX

EGO-GYRO suggests to give up the distinction between body,
architecture and technology for good. Could there be a plasma
of concrete, flesh and electrons which can react dynamically
to events, in which the events are nothing other than mutual
animations of architecture, body and technology? At present
we only know the relation between these three in the form
of comfort, in which technology seems to strive irrepressibly
to take over all activities of the human body - "comfort
is the technique of softening things up until the distinction
between the body and the prosthesis vanishes. It is a lubricant
that in the long run makes it possible for us to slide through
the world without resistance: a technical anaesthetic..."
But while the surrounding appliances automate the movements
of the body to a degree that it becomes completely paralysed,
the body itself will, by means of its motor system and its
suppleness, try to automate each activity in order to meet
with as little resistance from the outside world as possible.

EGO-GYRO implies the notion that a soft architecture
can only consist of a direct relation with the mobility
of the human body (and cannot be based on use, function
and form). Imagine an architecture that has been swallowed
up by technology so completely that it has become able to
speed up the body instead of calming it down, an architecture
which is able completely to absorb and enhance the plasticity
and the suppleness of the human body. Soft architecture
can never be sure of its form, its form is always something
dynamic - and it should be evident that this cannot be achieved
by classical architectural means.

Interfacing Realities: Manuel DeLanda

Bottom-up computer simulations (as they are used, for example,
in Artificial Life) are changing the way we explore dynamical
systems, such as cities and the societies they house. With
a short historical view, introducing the distinction between
capital and metropolis (say, Rome and Venice in the Middle
Ages, or Washington and New York today), I will explain
how some historians (Braudel, McNeill) now view the rapid
rise of the West as partly attributable to the dynamics
of metropolises. From here we will get into a philosophical
discussion of the issues raised in the conference, as they
can be explored via virtual environments within computers.
Understanding how the virtual worlds created by computer
simulations can allow us to go beyond the limitations of
top-down analytical techniques (and to instead "synthesise
a dynamical system" from the bottom-up) will involve a discussion
of the concepts from a variety of disciplines: The far-from-equilibrium
dynamics of Prigogine, the non-linear conceptsof chaos and
complexity theory, and the "population thinking" which characterises
neo-Darwinism.

The discipline of Artificial Life (AL),
in which evolutionary questions are explored by unleashing
a population of virtual animals within a computer, and the
evolution of the population over many generations explored,
is a good example of a modern research program which embodies
ideas from all three fields above. However, the exact same
techniques used in AL can be adapted for the study of urban
dynamics.